Note the participation of a North Korean competitor (#6), who did well but was rather unfortunate: he lost by 0,5 pt a long time winning game against Lee from South Korea (!) and he gave a hard time to Bai, losing to him by 1,5 pt).

As expected, during the AI summit in Wuzhen (cf. https://www.gofed.be/node/1036), AlphaGo (AG) swept all its human opponents: Ke Jie, the best player in the word (3-0 !) and the team composed by 5 top Chinese professional (1-0).

Unexpected was the announcement by DeepMind that this games were the last ones AG had played and that they hence turn their interest to other domains than go...(the question "how many handicap stones a top pro would need to beat it" will thus remains open! :-(

DeepMind won't (unfortunately) communicate AG's program, but they will publish an article in "Nature" (a famous scientific review).

Most of them are full of creative/ strange moves...In this video, Hwang In-seong (8d) showed the revolution in the way of thinking AG has brought (high level,in English!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO_JmGH8Iu8

The top teams qualified for the Pandanet Go European Team Championship Finals 2017 are: Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary. The finals will be played in Oberhof, on Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd July 2017.

This year Finland will drop out from the League A to the League B and Poland will join the League A as the winner of the League B. Germany and Italy will play the A/B deciding match 30th May.
This year’s two bottom teams in the League B – Slovakia and Croatia – will drop out to the League C directly, and the third one – Belgium – will play a deciding match with the League C winner Norway.
Iceland will move to the League D and the teams of Slovenia and Georgia will play the deciding match about the place in the League C.

15/05: despite presenting the probably best team possible (Gerald Westhoff 6d; Lucas Neirynck 5d; François Gonze 4d; Jan Ramon 4d), Belgian team did not manage to do better than a draw against our direct competitor, Slovakia.

And still, we had to win this match as to avoid to match a test-match against the winner of the C-league (Norway)to determine whether we'll still play in B-league next year of be demoted to the C-league.

True, the mission was difficult because the Slovakian best player being Pavol Lisy, a professional player (who defeated as expected Gerald), the Belgians had to win on all the 3 other boards.

And this nearly happened: Lucas and Jan won...
Unfortunately, François lost..by a small margin (3,5 pts)...

Now, Belgium had to overcome Norway on 30/05...otherwise we play in C-league the next season !
Let's cross our fingers !...